Editing multilvel list styles in Word

[Firepig]

Is there an easier way of editing multilevel list styles than using the Define New Multilevel List dialog box? In particular, to edit all levels at once?

I often find myself having to convert someone else's document into a company house style. Usually changing the font and paragraph settings in the Normal style does most of the work. But multilevel list styles are a real bore: there seems to be no way of changing the font and indent levels etc for the entire list. You have to go into each level of the list and change each setting manually. With up to 9 levels that's a chore. (You can set indents for the entire list with Set for All Levels but only if you want them to be the same all the way down the list - it doesn't work if you want a different setting for the first level, as I often do).

The ideal would be a dialog box as a control panel, allowing each setting to be changed for any or all levels. Even better if settings in lower levels could increment those from the level above, much as Set for All Levels does but with more control, and intelligently linking levels to paragraph styles - if the top level is Level 1 and is linked to style List Paragraph 1, it's good bet that the next level is to be Level 2 and linked to style List Paragraph 2 - yet you have to find the paragraph style for each level in a small dialog box with a lot of entries in it...

Thanks for any help.

Firepig (Office 2010 and Windows 8)

[Doug Robbins]

Via the Developer tab>Document Template utility, attach a template that has the desired styles to the document and (temporarily) check the update document styles box.

[Firepig]

Thanks Doug, I know that's the theoretically correct thing to do, but experience of updating styles in this way when working on other people's documents is not good. You don't know what modifications they've made to styles, or whether they have used styles with the same name as yours in unexpected ways. Where the objective is to achieve superficial correspondence, rather than complete conformity to a template, it's usually better to leave alone as much as possible.

Similarly I thought of importing a list style and applying it in substitution for the existing list style, but that also has its problems, I suspect. At very least you would have to re-associate the list style with paragraph styles - which is the most tedious part of the task I am hoping to simplify.

Why you can't make changes to the whole of a list style, I will never understand.

Firepig